largento

Thanks. I think having some structure will make backing up easier. And I should be able to archive episodes as they are finished, meaning I'll only have to keep the current episode folder on my hard drive. I think, too, that I'm going to make the Audio folder in the Production folder the low-quality wav files and put the high quality files in the Post-Production folder. I think creating subfolders for types of models (similar to what you show in your directory) is a good idea, too. Who knows if I'll be able to maintain the organization, but at least now I have a place to start. :-)

Thanks, Nancy! Very inspiring... So here's how I think I'm going to set this up to start with. I'll adjust as I go: At the Top Level, I'm going to have a folder for all the Paunk Show Assets. Subfolders will house the assets for the Paunk show wraparounds. The cho folder here will hold choreographies that have built sets, etc. Similarly, I'll have a folder for Parody Assets. They'll be the same structure as the Paunk Show Assets folder, just in individual subfolders for each property. The Final Files folder will have the final videos for each episode that are ready to upload, as well as the DVD files. The Promotional folder will be where I'll put all the non-production files. Ads, graphics etc. The Working Files folder will have a subfolder for each episode. The Episode subfolder will have folders for: Pre-Production, Production, Rendering and Post-Production Pre-Production will hold all the things that are accumulated prior to actually starting the episode. I'm not doing storyboards, but they could go here if I were. Production will have the working choreographies, audio files and I'll have a folder for saving my shaded Quicktime renders. Rendering will have a place for final choreographies, renders and the Photoshop Docs I create to do color correction, etc. Post-Production will be where I can put all of the AE & Premiere Files, as well as the final Quicktime movies rendered from Photoshop & AE. I'm also going to stick in a Miscellaneous folder in each section to give me a place to dump stuff that don't seem to fit.

I don't think I'd work well with the Library feature. I can see its usefulness in bringing in assets, but I know where my assets are. Like you, I usually have a project folder that has some structure, but still has lots of loose files. I had a decent system when I was doing the Wannabe Pirates, but the post files were easy to keep up with. There was a single image rendered for each panel, a single Illustrator file for each strip, etc. Animation, I find, can be much messier. In addition to all of the A:M files (and associated decals, rotoscopes, etc.) add thousands of rendered frames, audio tracks and all the files I stick into AfterEffects and Premiere and before long, it's a jumble. Not a disaster when it's just the one thing, but this is a SERIES, so I'm going to have to reel it in some. :-)

I'm not so much worried about it being transportable, but I want to eliminate clutter, redundancy and avoid having multiple files with the same name. Ideally, I'm shooting for having it modular enough that I can archive episodes as they are completed, but still bring them back in if I need to (like to make an HD version). There's just sooo many files that get generated in the production of something like this. Having a purposeful place for each one is difficult.

I'm over my head in a big project that is going to generate an enormous number of files and I want to establish some order before I get buried. I'm curious as to how everyone else organizes their files. What kind of naming scheme do you use? How do you handle the different types of assets (models, actions, audio files, decals, materials, etc.)?

Just an update on progress. Had a few stumbles with the production process, but better to make the mistakes early on than later. :-) My voice has returned enough that I've been able to do the final voice tracks, but this meant having to reanimate the lip-synching on the first Stalled Trek installment, which in turn, means that I'm having to re-render those shots. It's costing me time, but there were some technical mistakes in some of those shots that would have led me to re-render them anyway. Also, I've developed a sort of "style" with the lip-synching now and I was able to improve what I'd done before. I switched to using SoundBooth to handle the voice stuff and I'm finding I can control it much better than with GarageBand. I'm still using GarageBand for the music and sound effects, though. I'm managing to get by with just plugging in some musical stingers and a bit of me playing around on a melodica that I ordered last week. I lost a lot of time worrying over the audio side, so it's nice to know that I won't have to do that with the rest of them. As I'm waiting for these renders to finish, I'm trying to work up some kind of file organization for the rest of the episodes. When you have a lot of false starts, you end up with a large amount of files you don't need and I'm realizing I need to have everything streamlined, or I'm going to run out of space real fast. Right now, I've got 17.86 GB worth of files. One of the biggest problems is that I started this as Stalled Trek and a few weeks in decided to make it The Paunk Show. They really are two different things, but I need to organize them together somehow. Put everything in an order that makes sense and archive the extra stuff that I don't need. The final running time for the first episode came in at 6:15, which is great for bumping up the overall running time for the DVD, but it's more animation than I originally planned for. Thankfully, the Paunk stuff takes place on one set and is mostly one camera shot. I've found that I can animate a very large amount of dialogue in a day. Getting faster at this was bound to happen and it's making me more confident I can do the animation in the time I have left. It's been important to get this first episode into its final state just to prove to myself that it all will work. I'm pleased with the final product. It looks a whole lot better than I originally expected. I think the Paunk stuff is coming out pretty funny, too. It's going to have its own sort of storyline running across the episodes. But I'm easily two weeks behind on my schedule. I'm still planning on April 1st for the launch, but I may move that if need be. I'm not going to launch until all five episodes of this first series are completely finished.

That is awesome-sauce, Paul!

Thanks, guys! Hoping 44 is going to be a great year. Next year is (shudder) 45!

So here's a case where a guy who does a "stick figure" webcomic for six years launches a Kickstarter campaign to get $58K to reprint his books and gets $238K in the first week! That's the value in creating an audience! Wow.

If you're going for the internet audience, I think you should keep episodes very short. Definitely less than ten minutes. I'm thinking 5-7 is a good length. Folks have short attention spans. I'd shoot for 5 minute episodes and make them episodic (to be continued!) Myself, I'm going to do five episode "seasons" or series. I'll run the episodes weekly, but then take off for a few weeks between series. My thinking is that 25 minutes is the bare minimum running time I'd feel comfortable selling as a DVD. I'm going to finish the five episodes before launch, to give me a buffer. The three weeks between series will be "bonus buffer." :-) I'm thinking of the floppies-to-trade model that comics have. Regular DVDs with the individual series on them and collection DVDs with more content (and a higher price.) Is Tar of Zandoria going to still have nudity? I hate to say it, but a few topless hyena princesses will probably guarantee you more viewers. I don't know what YouTube's policy is on animated nudity, though.

Thanks, everybody! And that WBP cartoon is awesome, Rodney! :-)

I hadn't really thought of it in this way, but Tar of Zandoria being anthropomorphic could tap into the large audience for that kind of thing. I don't know much about the "furry" fans, but they are a pretty large group.

One possible solution is to cheat. :-) Here I created the keyhole with a face on it and used that same outer spline as the front of the padlock. This way I didn't have to continue the splines all through the mesh. You can see in the quick render that as long as it all remains flat on the front, there's no evidence that the keyhole isn't attached. I did this on one of the panels of my Star Trek bridge set and it saved me a lot of frustration.

Have a great one!

Nifty!

Nice texturing and modeling!

Finished setting up the set for the framing sequences.

I might, too. :-) Thanks, Mark, Jake & Rodney! I should have the opening titles sequence finished today, which will be all of the visuals for the first Stalled Trek segment. I finished the "Earth Nerd" character yesterday and started planning out the set for the host segments. I also took the whole thing into Garageband and did as much sound work as I could, making new sound effects since the original ones are copyrighted. I played around with some of the loops to create a theme song for the main show. It'll do for now. :-) Unfortunately, this chest cold still hasn't cleared up, so all of my voice work is temporary. It's going to be annoying to have to redub them all, but being that I'm dubbing to puppets, it shouldn't be too difficult. On the plus side, my raspy breathing provided the basis for a "ship's hum" sound effect. :-)

Happy Birthday! Hope it was a great one!

So, change of plans. After I animated the first shot of episode two, I started to be concerned that I needed to make sure that episode 1 was fully completed before moving on. So, I've been doing final renders and fixing up the shots for it over the last few days. It occurred to me that I needed some sort of framing device since this is being split into three-minute episodes. So, I came up with the idea that the episodes would be hosted by an alien character who has been intercepting broadcasts in space and is sharing them via his own show. This gives the show an actual name ("The Paunk! Show") and frees me up to do other parodies down the road. Although the plan to do ten episodes for this first season remains the same, I've decided I only need to have the first story finished by the deadline. By adding two minutes of host stuff to each episode, I now end up with five-minute episodes and 25 minutes of content is agreeable to me to put out on one DVD. This is a profound relief to me. I'm not really saving any work since I'll still be doing all ten episodes anyway. (In fact it's going to add an additional 20 minutes of animation to the project), but it means I don't have to kill myself to have all ten episodes done by April 1st. As fast as it's going, I might still succeed in that, but I don't *have* to. :-) Here's an image showing screen grabs from the first episode!

Thanks! Nothing as fancy as that, Stian. Although, probably more work. :-) 1) I use A:M's DOF in the render, which does the "big work". 2) In Photoshop, I duplicate the layer and use a pretty big gaussian blur. I set the layer's blend mode to either overlay or soft light and set it's opacity to something like 50%. This gives the entire image a sort of "filmic glow." 3) I create a mask in a new channel that is essentially a circle (or circles) around what I want to be in sharpest focus (the heads, for instance.) I then blur the mask, so that it is very subtle. 4) On the bottom layer, I load the mask as a selection and apply a very small gaussian blur. 5) I then create a new layer on top and fill it black using the same selection mask. I set it to multiply and then I dial the opacity down until you just get "darkened edges." 6) Lastly, I use an adjustment layer to color correct the image. All of this can be done in AfterEffects, too. I've just been doing it in Photoshop since they are still images. [EDIT] Here's an example taking one of your train renders and doing the post process. Without actual DOF in the render, you don't get the dramatic effect of it, but you do see how it softens the look of the whole render and focuses attention on the face. I can't actually change the DOF this way, but it does enhance what A:M is giving me and gives that "tilt-shift" look to it.

Thanks, guys! @Stian: I agree. It's partly post work I'm doing in Photoshop, but I like that it gives it all a "miniature" look which plays well with this being puppets. I also think that using the roughness combined with dof helps to sell the effect.

Thank you, gentlemen! Much appreciate it! I'm counting on there still being a bunch of old TOS fans out there. :-)

Thanks, Myron! This particular part of this whole crazy project was so daunting. I wasted a lot of the first day, researching photos and blueprints and the like, just because I was so intimidated by the size of it. When I was first starting out with A:M and working on Stalled Trek, creating the bridge set seemed nearly impossible. I managed to build the captain's chair and a couple of horrible attempts at some of the other bridge pieces, but couldn't imagine doing what I've done now ...and in only 3 days! As a bit of superstition this time around, I purposely held off modeling the captain's chair until last. A sort of, you can do the fun thing when you finish everything else. :-) Goes to show what perseverance and a whole lot of hard work can accomplish.

Thanks, Gerry! I'm definitely calling this a labor of love. I love the source material and I think that shows. Finally "finished" the bridge set! I'm going to have to revisit it prior to episode six, but this has everything I need for episode two. This is just a screengrab of a realtime render. Once I have the dummy legs made for the characters I'll set up the lighting and do a decent render. Hard to believe I'm only two weeks into this project! :-)